Abstract

In George Manville Fenn’s “The Blackbird Trap,” blackbirding—the labor trade operative in the nineteenth-century Pacific—is presented as a form of slavery that imperial authorities are unable to stop, despite Britain’s vaunted anti-slavery stance. The story is anomalous in its publication context of the Boy’s Own Paper, for the boy hero is unable to prevent blackbirding of the Islanders, and the perpetrator is never formally brought to justice. Positioning Fenn’s fictional narrative in the context of historical events and Tracey Banivanua-Mar’s analyses of colonial violence, this article explores how the apparent failures—both of the boy hero and imperial authority—can be read as enabling for the settler nation.

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